Punishment is just Abuse with an Excuse

I’m getting a few views, enough that on a good day it doesn’t seem pointless, like my idea is getting out there, albeit very slowly. I never expected more. If it was going to be a popular idea, it wouldn’t have been with me, because if an idea is popular, then its transformative power is already in play. It seems clear to me that if anything is going to change we need some new ideas, and those aren’t usually welcome, so long and slow – that is what success was always going to look like.

It’s such a leap of faith, though, folks. I can’t tell if I’m getting through at all. Can some of you please check in, just let me know you exist, let me know if you’re thinking about it? Please? I thought that I was planting a seed in some heads, just some little spark that would grow if it were real . . . will anyone confirm or deny? Is it sticking, at all?

“Is this thing on?” is what I’m saying.

Is this idea not interesting, not emotional, provocative, incendiary – loaded – like the same conversation is when I’m having it with parents? Not . . . fun?

I try to sound authoritative. I don’t think anyone listens if you’re asking questions, if you come from a place of not knowing, and frankly, within a very narrow set of definitions, I feel I am authoritative . . . but as a human being, I’m lost here, folks. I’m alone, and a human being alone is some kind of not right, a social animal alone is failing some kind of sanity test.

Reader, if you are some sort of smart scientist, I’m counting on you to let me know where I’m at, OK? Am I in a blind alley, it’s all been done and debunked? Or is there something here and I’ve got you thinking about it? I don’t want to have some dramatic moment of despair where I give up and burn it all down and then find out later some brilliant folks were taking it up and running with it, that it was catching on after all. I’m feeling the drama. I sense a Romeo and Juliet sort of ending coming, I want to be wrong about it.

8 thoughts on “Is This Thing on?”

Hi Jeff, oh, i am so with you! Being busy as all “get out” as my granny used to say, i cannot read as many blogs as i want to, but i need to tell you that i quote your “punishment is just excuse for abuse” weekly if not more often and daily assert to someone that i, like you, am against all forms of punishment, that it is the only “ideology”, as it were, that i would firmly stand behind and for and up for. I think it is the single most important idea to be found on the internet today, and your blog stands alone in speaking about it singularly and single-mindedly. Dont give up on this or it or yourself. This is such a hugely important idea that eventually society will, indeed must, come to recognize it or we will destroy ourselves…i thank god for people like you and blogs like yours that are devoted to the truly important ideas and principles in the world, while so many just waste their time on fluff and entertainment. Write on and, you know, right on!!!

Hey, Pam, sorry, I’ve been neglecting you, my life’s gone to shit over the last year or so too, it’s all blown up in my face. I suppose I’ll be blogging about that eventually. But you’re not going to like the new idea – all the bad effects of abuse are in fact the intended – if perhaps unconscious – effects of punishment and abuse. Hate to tell you, they drive us nuts on purpose, all this “consequences” stuff is a meme for warrior societies, it’s supposed to hurt us, embitter us, drive us mad – that makes us all better soldiers for the troop, ready and willing to attack the “other.” Happy, it is not, but it explains a great deal, and that’s gotta be good, right?

Dear Jeff, actually i have felt this was the case for a long time, that even the manifold abuses i suffered in hospitals and before, in childhood and such, was intentional (quite in comtrast to my brothers insistence that the intentions were good, just unconsciously perhaps darker) and deliberate. I believe, from my own experience, that torturers know precisely what they are doing and want to induce their victims to first become docile and obedient but then, in a version of the stockholm syndrome, to become torturers just like them. That is precisely why and how our society has continued to function as it has, with war after war after war, and mindless soldiers willing to kill and torture and give their own lives for “the father or motherland” i.e. Daddy and Mommy who of course were the primal torturers…

Now maybe you think torture is an exaggeration for the sorts of abuse and punishment we generally see meted out to children and even most adults (of course what happens in our prisons is unmistakably torture) but in my view any time you force anyone to see and hear the world from a point of view not their own fully free and chosen view, you have tortured them…

OMG i have so much to say on this subject, and not just from my own life but from observations i have on public life and others’ lives around me as well. Everything just seems now so clear, and tragically going not just to pot but to hell and worse in a jet-propelled handcart.

I don’t know what your life has been like this past year, and i have scarcely written in my blog at all about my own, but please know that i think your blog is important, far more so than mine, and it would be a huge loss if you stopped writing or thinking and sharing your thoughts, even as they develop and change.

If you ever want to share thoughts privately, feel free to email me. Pamwagg at the usual yahoo email . My best to you,

yeah, I’m afraid seeing this side of life makes it hard to live among those who haven’t – for them, I mean! For me too, though, maybe. I actually had a drug reaction, manic then depressed, from a biologic for psoriasis, Otezla. That break brought this insight and scared my wife and kids off, placing me probably squarely in the community of the mentally ill, or the alternatively cognitive, or whatever we are these days. Every time I get scary sad – been crying most days for 11 months – I vape it away, and that is expensive and doesn’t appear that it will work forever. Tough times.

I have found that weed is a much better drug for what ails me than nicotine, but maybe that is what you meant by vapes? (I am totally new to mj so i dont know the terms these days, but to me vaping means nicotine….?)

anyhow, either way, i completely and utterly get where you are coming from. In fact, i think most of my breaks are somehow drug-induced, even if by that i mean that i stop a drug and this induces a break,,. Nevertheless, that drug which i never needed before i was forced onto it, has caused this false dependency on it, to such an extreme extent that now if i miss even a few consecutive doses i could go bananas!

Nevertheless, think about this: how much worse would it be if you lived in this terrible world, where we have such president and republicsns runnign the country, and you could not cry at all, and did not even have the capacity to cry? I know it feels terrible, and people run away scared: what?!?! A man, crying!?!? That must scare the shit out of them too. But wow, forgive me if i tell you this, and know that i am NOT dismissing the terrible pain you feel at all, i just want you to know that i also think it is beautiful that you can feel enough to cry and admit it, publically. That tells me for certain that You, man, are not a warrior soldier for real!! And i just admire that completely….even as my heart aches for you and for anyone who suffers. It is important that you NOT pathologize this, not label it as mental illness and objecitfy yourself into something abhorrent or stigmatic. No, this is a feeling state that men are not allowed, and in some sense, just as you think forbidden thoughts, like “punishers abuse on purpose to hurt victims in order to convert them…etc” maybe your 11-months long crying jag is also feeling forbidden feelings on behalf of all those men-warriors who are not permitted to cry and feel anything at all?

I really no longer believe in labels for anyone, not even for Trump, except that of royal asshole, but then you know it is meant as an insult and does not pretend to be anything loftier. No more diagnoses or other forms of name-calling for me. Mental illness name-calling has absolutely no basis in science,and i doubt any will be found…though many have been suggested and manufactured for the lay population but all are lies! There are no anatomical, neurotransmitter or biochemical bases for any so-called mental illness that we have been informed about , it is all name-calling and i am through with it!